Tag: bike sharing

Illegal parking, vandalism and traffic violations are rife in cities designed more for cars than bicycles

China’s bike-sharing boom has put millions of new bicycles on city streets now mainly designed for cars, and that’s causing problems in a country previously known as the “kingdom of bicycles”.

The mainland is now home to more about 40 dockless shared-bike start-ups whose smartphone apps give people access to a network of bikes for as little as one yuan (14.5 US cents) an hour. The charges are paid via digital wallets and GPS-tracking devices on the bikes mean they can be left anywhere at the end of a ride.

Vandals blocking streets with mountains of share bikes is just one of the program’s problems.

They’ve been stripped bare, thrown in dumpsters, hung in trees, set on fire, wrenched out of shape, tossed in canals, flung under cars and piled in mangled heaps outside of town.

In one video, a young man trundles to the riverfront in the northern city of Tianjin and flips one casually into the water. In others, a pack of children vandalise them with delight, and an old woman bludgeons hers with a hammer.

During the 2007 financial crisis, former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince famously said: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

Looking at the bike-sharing business in China today, you see a lot of such dancing. You see a nice simple business that has been deluged with hype and money.